Earlier today we posted that American Express was clawing back points from the Hilton 6x/12x grocery promotion. American Express is also offering increased earning rates at grocery stores on other cards as well:
Unfortunately cardholders are also seeing clawbacks on these cards. I suspect this is largely due to gift card purchases, but it’s still unclear if American Express is just basing this off high spend or if they are using level three data to see that gift cards were purchased.
Looks like clawback is happening again on my Hilton and Marriott cards.
In my opinion, this is all Amex squeezing their customers because they are not succeeding in growing their market share/profitability. Have to try to make it up somewhere. MS represents such a small percentage of their costs as it does for most banks, you can bet them paying to squeeze their customers with this level of scrutiny means they’re in trouble. Also, I don’t want my credit card company to look at what I bought in detail, frankly. Seems like a real privacy issue there. Surprised no one has raised holy hell about that in a time people are screaming about their anonymized data being data mined by big tech. This is a huge “big brother” data collection program if I’ve ever seen one. I’m glad I moved to Chase mostly. Seems like they only go after the heavy hitters which makes sense.
It is a stretch to use a product then claim you have privacy rights within the product.
It’s not a stretch to have a reasonable expectation that banks aren’t looking at all transactions for whatever reasons they deem appropriate to see what you bought exactly, where, and when simply because you choose the convenience of using a credit card. Not talking about legal rights, more about consumer awareness. I just wonder if anyone really has considered the broader implications of what Amex is up to here, not just RAT. Especially when you’re talking about a wealthier segment that tends to not like being tracked in detail and having that info periodically rifled through by someone, or worse, packaged and resold.
Haha you used their money on their product to make a purchase using their network. Your purchase violated the terms of the program and is effectively stealinh but you want to claim a privacy exemption so you can steal. What’s next they shouldn’t be able to make lending decisions based on your credit score?
“He used their money” ??? Nope we are using our money and we do not like to have our spending patterns investigated. This is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and actually it should not even be Amex’ business how we are using their cards. If you do not like that we are buying VGCs, well, work with the grocers and GC issuers so that Amex could not be used there, like e.g. USPS did. That should not be our problem.
Lots of cheap moralizing and corporate shilling in these threads, spiced with a bit of trolling by the Chinese brigade.
When you buy using a credit card you’re using the banks money, albeit temporarily. Whether you pay it off in full each statement period or not, you’re still using someone else’s capital to complete the purchase.
Sure, I get how they feel justified to place controls on how we spend money since it’s on credit after all. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to accept they’re recording every individual thing I buy in a massive data store just waiting to be breached by someone. The fact that they are doing this analysis to such s granular degree that they’re automating claw backs etc shows that is in fact the case. Why shouldn’t that make people uncomfortable, specifically the same people that don’t want voice ai assistants in their home or google data mining their phones?
No, it is not banks money. They extended me a line of credit and I should be able to use it any way I want unless prohibited by law, until they revoke that line of credit.
I did no such thing. I don’t use Amex for anything save for very specific outliers. I don’t care they claw points back for violating their terms as those are the rules. All credit card issuers do this including Chase that I do use use to buy gift cards in small amounts on occasion. I know the risk but I appreciate they aren’t compiling a detailed record of what I buy. If they see obvious bad behavior they take all yours points. They don’t seem to worry about the remaining .00001% they lose from people that are all about optimizing spending like me which makes sense. Why collect level 2 data and spend a huge amount of money to store all that data in a way that you can quickly query it to only flag a very small amount of purchases if there wasn’t some other ROI from that investment like selling that data. Pulling my credit is a far cry from recording and storing data on every item a cardholder buys anywhere and using that data for whatever makes them happy. There’s no way they made that huge investment for squeezing a very small percentage of customers.
I’ve never bought a gift card with my amex, but I’m just curious if you get notified of a clawback or are miles just deducted?
In past clawbacks they did send out a letter post clawback (this was on MR cards). I suspect the same here but early days of course.
Does any know if AmEx has clawed back points / disallowed spend on its America Blue Cash Preferred? Seems like a 6% grocery spend would be an attractive target for them.
Plz no….. I already MSed 6k on both BCP and EDP this year….
Thanks for the information. Will forward this info back to the team tomorrow.
Imagine if they had physical banks.
They would claw back from your Checking/Savings accounts.
Amex does have their own savings account product
MSing with Amex cards in 2020 and beyond is a bust at this point.
In stores with pharmacies do they collect level three data? I always thought it was NOT collected there.
I pay for prescriptions all the time with an Amex at a grocery store, specifically Wegmans, and never have a problem.
To my knowledge pharmacies only provide level 1 data, unless you use a business card which will provide level 2 data. Typically they would need to pay extra for that more detailed information.
SUB? Pop-up blocked. Spend? Clawed back.
I’m not sure Amex should be considered “point earning cards” anymore. They’re a secured deposit away from competing with Credit One
Got y’all ha!
suckers
Do NOT piss rats off, they will bite you
I fought the Claw and the Claw won.
Unlike the Hilton thread, I don’t see any data points. Do you have any? I ask because on other web sites all the DPs I’ve seen were people who had their Hilton grocery spending clawed back and _also_ had Marriott/Delta grocery spending clawed back. I have yet to see any DP of someone who had their Marriott bonus grocery points (which were capped) clawed back w/o also having Hilton grocery spending clawed back.
If American Express thinks your $10k of grocery spending on your Hilton card is fishy, then having $7500 in grocery spending on your Marriott card in the same month would be doubly fishy.
Yes via e-mail. I’ll follow up to see if they had Hilton clawed back as well.
Thanks. Inquiring minds want to know. Ha.
In my own case, I haven’t had a problem, but my last AmEx bill only had one grocery charge over $500, and a couple others over $400, so whatever the RAT’s cutoff is for legitimate spending, I guess I didn’t cross it.
However, I am going to stop spending on my AmEx cards. It just isn’t worth it. There are too many other cards with grocery bonuses out there.